


Each Other's Words

by bookslug



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:09:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookslug/pseuds/bookslug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set directly after 2x06, from Bel's point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each Other's Words

I was nothing as I listened.

We've found him.

I was blank.

I was speechless.

I was a speechless child lost in a storm.

I was nothing as I ran. Instinct, another force, a side of me I have not met, somehow successfully navigated my limbs through the newsroom, the building, outside, down streets I do not care for. I am surprised I did not fall over on my way. I managed it though, my heart beating with the pulse of an injured hummingbird. My brain did nothing. For once, it was lagging. My emotions were only with Freddie. I was only with Freddie.

There must have been a magnet inside him and a matching one inside me, that locked my gaze onto him without needing to search. He was in the distance, surrounded by a circle of people who did not deserve to be there. I could only see a few inches of him: a tilted shoe scuffed as ever, an open palm that so many times I've seen held to out to me, an open eye surrounded by such deep a red that surely his very skin had been removed. The people dispersed. I sank to my knees, and his face was in my hands before I could know what I was holding. His face. His bloody face. His lips. His bloody lips. His eyes. His bloody eyes. Him. Bloody, bloody Freddie.

There were paramedics. Hands. Moving me off him, him off me. Rushed voices, but they're not rushed enough; they didn't understand what they were losing. I fought as I followed him into the screaming white ambulance, breaking free from someone grabbing my arm and now he lies next to me, broken but eyes sharp through the blood as if he can win. Our hands slip into each other's, fingers interlocking, as easy as water filling cracks.

"Moneypenny."

He had called me Moneypenny the first time I met him. When I had shouted, screamed at him for stealing my story when he'd really beaten me to it and he had shrugged, apparently unaffected by my anger, before nonchalantly replying "get over it, Moneypenny", tilting his head with the childish wonder that he holds in such an undeniably adult way, smiling at me like I was a story all by myself. I think that was when I started hating him. I think that was when I started loving him. An extension only Freddie can manage. I had thought our relationship, friendship - the organic, moving thing that is our own and only our own - was undefinable...but love describes it quite well. For me, at least. For him, I am still not sure.

Lying there, a hero. The bravest man I have ever known. Leaning over him, a coward.

I hate myself.

I love him.

"I..." he begins.

A cough steals the rest of his words. Freddie swallows, opening his mouth again only for blood to gurgle his voice away, but for once he doesn't need his unique ferocity for language: his gaze alone is as clear as his voice or pen.

"...love you," I finish for him, for both of us. The sentence leaves me as unthinkingly and naturally as breath, for we have always been at each other's words. "I love you," I say again. "You foolish child... I love you."

And somehow he loves me too.

As if he has have now gained permission, he relaxes in my arms, his eyes close and, before I can catch him, he is gone. I don't know where, or if it's permanent. I hold on tighter.

Why now?

*

They performed surgery straight away, and I was ushered to an empty cafe to sit over the empty cup of coffee that I drank too quickly, smoke the packet of cigarettes that ran out before I had a chance to enjoy them, and watch the deadened night that never seemed to end. The last smoke of my cigarettes curled into it, uncatchable. The surgery was completed in a matter of hours, successful in that it did what it was meant to do: fix the bones that were broken (two ribs and the radius of his left arm), stop the internal bleeding, sew him together again.

He continued to live. Yet, when he was pushed out of surgery, he was a different man. With the colour sucked out. Like he had been drained of Freddie. They aren't sure if he is going to wake up, that I just have to wait. Well, I've never been good at that. I've always had an unquenchable need to drag time forward, find the answer myself.

The hospital we're in, though, is small, white and featureless, and my eyes - dragged by that magnet again - are only for Freddie. I want dizzying colours, whizzing objects, endless optical illusions to nauseate my brain so it can't focus on that man lying, barely breathing, in the corner. Before, he was a blur of injury. The only question I could ask was: dead or alive? I am not sure I even managed to vocalize it. The process of speech I have known since childhood seemed to fail at some broken junction in my upper chest. Now though, the world is crisp, and my ability to formulate stories from visual clues (my job) brings me insights and realizations that make me shake and cry. It's an endless cycle: I start at his head, see the nature, severity and possible cause of each injury, and then imagine it, the clenching hands, the kicks, the blows, the cry of pain, the slow formation of the wound, Freddie thudding against the wall still smiling. My gaze drags me down his head, his neck and collarbones - each of which I have wondered at their taste - and down each individual arm, to the tip of each individual finger - the taste of which I know, due a to a play fight - back up and around his chest, all of which is exposed - is he cold? - and then I have to skip over the white blankness of the sheet that stretches from his waist to the lumps of his feet and just wonder about the damage of the rest of his body. Then I start again.

The nurses seem curious about us, asking me questions about our relationship that I haven't answered - so they made one up. They described him as my 'partner'. I suppose that description's as good as any. They are an appreciated distraction from the room being lightened by morning. Each time my gaze journeys up and down his body, more of his suffering is made known to me.

The others will be arriving to work soon, amid congratulations and pinches of each other, smiling over their coffees and lax over next week's deadline. Hector, in particular, will be surrounded by it. I am not angry with him, he deserves the praise, but then I look at Freddie and I wonder who could deserve it more than him. My brave idiot.

The door opens, and I jump slightly. The man - not a nurse, definitely not a nurse - smiles as he enters. Hector is as oblivious, but as in control, as always.

"Bel! How is he-"

"You're meant to be at work," I say, habit bizarrely undermining all circumstance.

"I wanted to find you-"

Hector's gaze has found Freddie.

"Gosh."

The stupid smile goes.

"Gosh..."

Slowly, he walks over to him, stands by the side of the bed, his thigh touching the mattress, looking down on someone he's always hated looking up to. I want to jump between them, stop the world that isn't me touching or looking at him - but I know that's impossible, especially with Freddie who loves the world, if only to tease it. Protection is not what he would want.

"Gosh," says Hector again.

"A shimmering vocabulary, Hector."

Hector turns to me, like he had forgotten I was there, catching my gaze and not letting it go like only he can.

"How did you find us?" I ask. My voice is as emotionless as I can get it, but Hector is still staring at me like he is concerned. I cross my legs. It makes me feel more in control, even if it is just over the lower half of my body. "Well?"

"When you've just uncovered a corrupt police force, you can find out most things with a little persuasion."

Hector lowers himself into the chair next to mine, his mouth open but the lower jaw jutted to the left of the upper like he had been punched.

"Corruption through uncovered corruption," I say. "How very you."

My hands interlock and part again and again until he puts his hands over mine, squeezes so I stop fidgeting, before lets go and puts his arm around my shoulders, heavy but unobtrusive. Solid, unfailing warmth.

"Will he...He must... Live?"

I've refused to help him get there, but Hector asks the question that he's been wanting to ask all along, quietly, as if he thinks talking about death too loudly will deliver the thing itself.

"We wait."

I let my head fall on him. I am allowed, surely. This once.

"Oh Bel."

*

The desire to go on is waning. Freddie still hasn't woken up. There is no doubt, though, that I will stay here. I know the nurses now. Their mannerisms, the way to charm them, the meaning of their many expressions: good, bad, is he going to wake up? They still don't know. It's been nearly twenty four hours, and only once has Freddie been visited by Doctor Parker: that is why they don't know, because they haven't checked.

The team are gathered round his bed, before work. I have been excused by Randall, for a reason that doesn't need to be spoken. The rational part of me knows that I should thank the team being so concerned for Freddie, for helping me so much but the endless, black chasm, parasitic within me leaves the appreciation hollow. When they move too loudly, when they talk, when they are, it grinds me like a migraine.

Hector has somehow snuck a bottle of gin and a crystal glass into the hospital, despite the fact that Lix told me they checked his bag. Quietly, in the corner, the gin is moving from the bottle to his stomach. Lix has ran out of cigarettes and has resorted to tapping, not annoyingly, silently against her stomach. While Sissy is talking a lot and Isaac laughing even more nervously than normal at everything she says, Randall is even more contained than normal. He got up three times to straighten his chair and I see his leg occasionally flinch as if he wants to do it again. I just sit, not speaking, staring at only Freddie and then anywhere but him. We are a collection of vices.

"The Hour, hit BBC show, has moved to St Bartholemew's Hospital. The team now localise themselves and their stories around one unremarkable room on the fifth floor. Unremarkable, apart from that one of their star journalists is unconscious in it - and yet the team still gather around him like he's their inspiration," says Lix, in a male commentator's voice.

I close my eyes as the chatter continues. The comments no longer belong to individuals. I try to make them white noise.

"So many phonecalls in the last few days. Some are so angry."

"The other news stations are worried. All the best news stories bring anger."

"Hector is being unbearably smug."

"Well, who wouldn't be if they were me?"

"Well he wouldn't have tools to be smug if it wasn't for Freddie. How weird it was to see Freddie silent. Even when he sleeps, I bet h enever stops thinking!"

"He doesn't sleep much anyway," I say.

Everyone turns to me.

"Huh. Now I think about it," says Sissy. "I'm not surprised.. It's nice to know that even he couldn't get himself to be quiet. Constant chatter..."

Randall suddenly stands up. "I've been blackmailed to let the team come back at lunchtime, but it's nearly 9am so we must be going. Phone straight away if there's news."

The others nod, and troop out, the door closing with finality.

Lix still sits, with a glance that give me permission to let go.

"I can't," I say.

My shoulders hunch, my head falls into my hands. I am terrified, all of a sudden, to look up and see Freddie. Face pale, a chameleon in the sheets when in life he is anything but. Mouth slightly open. Motionless. Everything but himself. The image stays with me whether I open my eyes or not. Positives are non-existent. I find myself shake. I don't want him to go again, not now I've leapt. Not now I've tasted, literally, what it's like to be with him and it was better than I ever imagined. Wake up, Freddie. Wake up.

A swollen eye - from a fist? A broken rib - from a kick? A split lip, dried now, permanent like cement - from a punch that rattles his teeth into his own flesh? What did he say to them? What did he spit in their face? What words, infuriating them to dizziness, led to such violence? What could? Does he really value himself so little? Is truth really worth you, Freddie? How could he abandon himself, me, us?

"I'm furious."

"Of course you are," says Lix.

There is a handy dispassionate list of his injuries - visible and invisible - hanging from the end of the bed, accessible at any time but memorised anyway. My training as a journalist, seeing every possibility, every possible explanation for what happened to him, seeing it like I was there, is no longer worth the career that preceded it. I squeeze my eyes further shut, but it does not take away what I know.

"Darling, please, get some rest. You're beginning to look like me."

I look up. Lix is very close, crouching to my level in the chair. I am suddenly aware that my face is wet, though I hadn't realised I had been crying.

"Sorry, I-"

"Don't be silly," says Lix, pressing a handkerchief in my open hand. "You need to leave. Get some caffeine, if you can't get sleep. Let's go for a coffee."

"The hospital has caffeine."

"Don't joke, Bel."

I snort without meaning to. "You're right. The hospital has heated mud... but I can't leave. How are you still here under Randall's nose?"

Lix raises her eyebrows slightly, but doesn't answer. I have no motivation to press, despite the fact I had always considered my curiosity limitless. A defining characteristic more than perhaps anything else - shaping my life, the friends I choose and the friends I am chosen by. Now, though, it seems it has reached its limits. It's carrying power is being stretched by Freddie's recovery; if I had an interest in anything else it would burst. Any questions I ask are due to tact - which somehow remains - apart from those addressed to the doctors who I cannot be bothered to melt with manners, given they barely ever turn up, and given their answers are the most important I will hear in my life.

I fold my arms, and lean back in my chair. The chair that seems like an extra limb, it's been connected to me for so long. A day only - but one that has crunched a lifetime's emotion into it. I feel this room is part of me now and, me, a part of it. There is a stain on the red, worn chair where I spilt coffee. There is a scent of smoke in the air. I make sure the curtains, unlike before, are always open, as if the call of the world will wake Freddie up. Lix's appearance is just a state of passing flux: she will go again; I will stay.

"I also brought your toothbrush, some food which, you'll be pleased to know, is not sourced from within the hospital, and a few wonderful books," says Lix, placing a bulging paper bag on the table next to me, and taking a seat at the end of Freddie's bed, almost touching his sheet-covered feet. "Hector was concerned after he saw you, and I know Hector well enough to know that when he's concerned, something must be desperately wrong."

I eye Freddie. "Well, yes."

"He wasn't talking about Freddie."

I thrust my hand towards Freddie, but my voice contains no such vigour. "Why are people worrying about me when he is lying there...?"

"Try not to let his wounds hurt more than one."

I lower my arm."You think that's easy?"

"No, Bel - how could that be easy? Or possible even." She smiles but it is gone a second later, as if to demonstrate how quickly love's happiness passes. "We all have aspirations, though, don't we? Just try to look after yourself... This, really, is not me patronising you. God knows I would be doing the same in your position."

"What is this, then?"

"Just letting you know I'm here," she says, then watches her hand spread out on the sheet in front of her, before looking at me. "You really do love him, don't you?"

I feel myself nodding, though I'm glad it doesn't transfer to speech.

Lix nods too, before standing up.

"Anyway, I must go back to work. Good luck, darling."

I nod and, a moment later, Lix has swung through the door and gone.

"Moneypenny."

I jump up to my feet, like some type of petrified, athletic animal. The air has left me. My hands are shaking. I think I must have made an involuntary noise. I rush forward, my legs and body once again leading me like they've never done before. It takes a few moments of staring at Freddie before I conclude that either he spoke or I have gone insane from grief or lack of sleep. Regardless, this indescribable feeling is worth the delusion. His eyes are open, his mouth is twisted into a smile, one eye swollen shut, but the other staring right at me. I grip his shoulders. They shake under my grasp, and I don't know if it's him shaking, or me, or both. I don't particularly care. He is grinning. He is actually grinning.

"You look awful," he says.

There is a grin on his battered face that shouldn't be there, that I never thought would be there again. I thought I would be forever in that chair, but I won't be I won't. I sit on the bed, cupping his face, gently touching this delicate art work that will rip at too hard a touch.

"Freddie. God!"

I kiss him, delicately like when he kissed me that first time, but we have swapped roles. This time it's me testing, giving an opportunity for him to run away, scared he will break if pressed too hard. Freddie has made me brave. The last day of nearly losing what could have so easily been mine, has made me enjoy leaping despite the risk - part of the attraction is the risk... And if he doesn't want it well then he's alive, he's alive, he's alive. Freddie breaks away. I glance between his eyes, looking for an answer.

"I've been awake for a few minutes, waiting for Lix to leave," he says, holding my face too. "I thought I would never see you again. This feels like a dream."

I am staring at the old Freddie - one that, though I worried about, there was a still a part of me that saw an indestructible hero.

"My dream too then."

We're giggling like we're drunk.

Freddie suddenly winces, and I realise how weak and papery his voice has been. I no longer feel drunk, and he is definitely no longer indestructible.

"Oh God. What hurts?"

I reach over for the button by his bed, to call the nurse. He lifts his hand slightly in objection, but then drops it as if he can't raise it that high and replaces his it with his voice.

"Moneypenny, moneypenny! I'm okay. I feel rotten, but-"

"I'm calling the-"

"No! It's like if you could have a hangover before getting drunk - I know it will be over and be replaced with happiness. You and me. Bad before the good, not good before the bad. Life should also be this way round-"

"You're babbling, you fool."

"I'm very high on morphine. It does that to people. I can hardly imagine what it would do to you."

I reach for the button again.

"No!" Freddie grabs my wrist. "We can't let Cilenti have control of us. We're owed these minutes. Plus I am high on morphine and you seem high on something else, so let's just enjoy this, painless for a bit."

"A clever fool, unfortunately for your health," I murmur, my hand taking his jaw again. "Only a few more minutes, and if you wince one more time..."

"Oh that's what got you worried! When I smile, it can be mistaken for a wince."

"Your nose goes piggy when you lie, Mr. Lyon... "

Our hands are interlocked but constantly changing as our fingers sway from side to side, like we're trying as many positions as possible to make up on lost chances.

"I wrote you a letter, you know," says some part of me that I've only come to know in the last few hours.

"Yes. Is this any specific letter you're talking about?"

"When you were in San Francisco. I never sent it."

"That was silly."

"Very."

"But oh so very you, so very charming."

"I said its essentially its whole contents in the ambulance anyway, when you were slipping in and out of consciousnesses."

"You'd be surprised how much I remember...Something along the lines of, you foolish child Freddie Lyon..."

It had been so odd in the ambulance, Freddie not retorting to my jibe, that it felt like something inside me had slid into the wrong place.

"I chose the word brave in the letter," I say.

"...And that," continues Freddie, smiling. "I love you?"

"You, Freddie Lyon, have a disgustingly good memory."

"But you're the foolish child," he says quickly, before wiping a forgotten tear off the side of my face. "Caring about me when I married a French girl with a distaste for trousers. It should have been you."

"Foolish? Very well. I know, now, that I prefer that to being a coward."

"I love you."

We kiss again, and as we do so, his statement sinks in. I love you, I feel it in the complete certainty and creativity of the kiss. Like one of our conversations, always new, grounding, dizzying; quick and exciting; slow and gasping. For once, though, we have more than each other's words. We have each other. Hands exploring independent of our minds, teeth running along each other's lips, lips running along each other's skin and no longer knowing or caring whose body is whose, whose breath is whose, who is who. What it is to live. Together.

It is then, of course, when I am about to crawl under his duvet, carefully work my way around his injuries which once day we will have to discuss, their repercussions, how furious I am with him, how much terror he must feel though he grins, that the team come in for their lunch break. With a chatter which will not be shaken off. I break from Freddie, and lean on the window sill. Freddie doesn't bother at all to flatten his hair. I glare at him. He smiles and raises his eyebrows, so his swollen eye is stretched. They are all gathered round him, saying so much, but one word is repeated again and again.

"Freddie!"

Hector is laughing, leaning in closest, while Lix stands by the door, just watching. Everyone near his bed grabs his hands. He stares around them all, delighted. Freddie catches my eye, never stopping grinning and, for this precious hour, I let myself believe he is completely fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! The last episode hit me so hard. I just adore these two. I was scared writing this, as the relationship is so well balanced. I think I kept it so short for damage control!


End file.
